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How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor is unavailable, but you can change that!

How (Not) to Be Secular is what author Jamie Smith calls “your hitchhiker’s guide to the present.” It is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor’s monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor’s landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present—a pluralist...

existence” (p. 445). There is no ancien régime we can take for granted, and no enchanted cosmos in which God resides and in which we are embedded. So religion (and religious identity) changes, too: God is now present in his design, in order. He will be similarly present in our polity, if we construct it aright, if we conform our constitution to the order God decrees in the heavens. “The divine isn’t there in a King who straddles the planes. But it can be present to the extent that we build a society which plainly
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